The many colors of green

Last week, the Politics blog flagged a controversy California’s Senator Barbara Boxer found herself in, when she told the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce that the NAACP supports the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Alford

Henry Alford was testifying before Boxer to oppose the act and claimed to represent the “black community.” But when Boxer pointed to the NAACP position, Alford accused Boxer of being “racial.”

Alford, whose group is largely funded by Exxon, has a lot at stake in claiming to represent the black community. If clean energy continues to be cast as a white concern, it will be that much easier to dispel carbon regulation as a pie-in-the-sky move that will break the wallets of the disadvantaged (which it won’t).

Industrial apologists love to call environmentalism a form of white privilege. But a growing body of polls of minority communities reveals precisely the opposite. The polls find high levels of support for clean energy and climate regulation.

A recent poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change showed that 81 percent of African Americans support strong action by the federal government to deal with climate change. The poll also found that

On balance, while African Americans do not believe dealing with global warming will be cost free, they do believe that not dealing with global warming will be more costly, and that a clean energy economy represents a better future.

A May poll of California’s Asian communities done by the California League of Conservation Voters found (according to a press release) that four of of five call themselves environmentalists and that 72 percent see environmental regulation as a benefit to society.

A 2008 Sierra Club-commissioned national poll of Latino voters similarly found that 81 percent considered global warming a “major problem” and 80 percent recognized that “energy usage had a substantial impact on their environment.”

And yesterday, the Navajo National Council created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to spur green jobs in their community.

Poor communities and communities of color disproportionately suffer the brunt of dirty energy. The Navajo Nation has been saddled with uranium mining on its lands. [Update: The NY Times covers the effects of uranium mining on Navajo lands.] And two-thirds of the Latinos polled knew of toxic sites near where they live or work.

Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, Co-Chair of CEAC, said, “Addressing climate change must be a priority for all Americans, but it’s especially important for African Americans, who have been and will continue to be one of the most impacted groups.”

By all accounts, minority communities see opportunities for cleaner air and more jobs in the American Clean Energy and Security Act. That’s bad news for the right-wing propaganda machine that uses faux populism tinged with racism to persuade people to vote against their own interests. It is they that have some “‘splainin’ to do.”